IT Operations (Information Technology Operations)

IT Operations is the people and management processes associated with IT service management to deliver the right set of services at the right quality and at competitive costs for customers.[1]

IT Strategy identifies the demand - which products and services to build, when, and in which quantity - while IT Operations determines the supply - builds and deploys the products and services - in collaboration with IT Sourcing which determines what to build, what to buy and from whom.

Every organization that uses computers has at least loosely-defined IT operations, based on how it tends to solve internal and client needs. Elements of IT operations are chosen to deliver effective services at the required quality and cost. IT operations are usually considered to be separate from IT applications. In a software development company, for example, IT operations include all IT functions other than software development and management. However, there is always some overlap between the departments. IT operations determine the way an organization manages software and hardware and includes other IT support, such as network administration, device management, mobile contracting and help desks of all kinds. IT operations management (ITOM) and IT operations analytics (ITOA) help an organization refine the way that IT approaches services, deployment and support and help to ensure consistency, reliability and quality of service. Current IT trends affecting IT operations include cloud computing, machine-to-machine (M2M) communications and the Internet of Things (IoT). The efficiency of cloud computing typically means that IT operations for a given organization require fewer administrators. The increasing interconnectivity and automation of M2M and IoT require adaptations to the traditional IT operations skill sets and business processes. Different organizations define IT operations in various ways; the term is also used to describe the department that manages IT operations as well as the collection of services and processes and how the department operates as a standardized procedure.[2]

Joe Hertvik defines IT Operations as being "responsible for the smooth functioning of the infrastructure and operational environments that support application deployment to internal and external customers, including the network infrastructure; server and device management; computer operations; IT infrastructure library (ITIL) management; and help desk services for an organization."

IT operations is generally viewed as a separate department from software development. It can include "network administration, device management, mobile contracting and help desks of all kinds."

Ernest Mueller defines IT operations as "a blanket term for systems engineers, system administrators, operations staff, release engineers, DBAs, network engineers, security professionals, and various other subdisciplines and job titles."[3]

The IT Operations Process[4]
Some methods will choose to prescribe a single approach, such as capturing architectural requirements in the form of epics or pre-building “architectural runways,” but the Disciplined Agile framework promotes an adaptive, context-sensitive strategy. DA does this via its goal-driven approach that indicates the decision points that you need to consider, a range of techniques or strategies for you to address each decision point, and the advantages and disadvantages of each technique. In this section we present the goal diagram for the IT Operations process blade and overviews its decision points. Figure 1 overviews the potential activities associated with Disciplined Agile IT Operations.

Run solutions. The reason why your IT operations efforts exist is to run your organization’s solutions in production.

Manage infrastructure. Your IT ecosystem is made up of the solutions that you build and buy as well as the infrastructure (hardware, software, network, cloud, and so on) that those solutions run on. This infrastructure must be managed (and evolved).

Manage configurations. You need to understand the configuration of your IT ecosystem, including dependencies between various aspects of it, to support impact analysis of any potential changes. Traditional strategies are centered around manual maintenance of configuration and dependency metadata, a risky and expensive proposition at best. Agile strategies focus on deriving/generating the required metadata from development tools, particularly from agile management tools such as VersionOne or the Atlassian Suite -or- from executable test specifications.

Evolve infrastructure. You will evolve your IT infrastructure over time, upgrading databases, operating systems, hardware components, network components, and many more. Due to the significant coupling of your solutions to your infrastructure, and infrastructure components to other aspects of your infrastructure, this can be a risky endeavor (hence the need to identify the potential impact of any change before making it).

Mitigate disasters. Disciplined organizations will plan for operational disasters. Potential disasters include servers going down, network connectivity going down, power outages, failed solution deployments, failed infrastructure deployments, natural disasters such as fires and floods, terrorist attacks, and many more. Furthermore, it is one thing to have disaster mitigations plans in place, it is another to know whether they actually work. Disciplined organizations will run through disaster scenarios to verify how well their mitigation strategies work in practice. This can be done on a scheduled basis at first, evolving into unscheduled or “random” problems (via something like ChaosMonkey) and eventually even full-fledged disaster scenarios.

Govern IT operations. As with other process blades, the activities of IT Operations must be governed effectively. Operational governance is part of your organization’s overall IT Governance and Control efforts.

IT Operations Tasks[5]
In general, the rest of IT Operations tasks fall into three areas: Computer Operations & Help Desk; Network Infrastructure; and Server and Device Management. So here’s what the Venn Diagram (Figure 2.) looks like, when we break down IT Operations into these areas.

Network and individual storage management to insure that all applications have access to the storage requirements they need for disk, memory, backup, and archiving

Email and file server configuration and folder setup and authorization: This is classified as a separate area because outside of order taking & fulfillment and customer service, email and file server management are two of the most important IT functions in a company

Strategic (long term) versus tactical (short term). There is a fine balance between ensuring operational safety while enabling the evolution of operational systems.

Operations needs versus organizational needs. You want to not only optimize the flow of operational work but do so within the context of your larger organization – Context Counts.

Standardization versus evolution. To reduce the overall cost and risk associated with operations, and to simultaneously make it easier for development teams to test and release changes into production, you want to standardize as much of your IT infrastructure as possible. Yet your infrastructure cannot be allowed to stagnate, it must safely evolve over time – Hence the need to work with your Enterprise Architecture efforts to envision the future and run experiments so as to learn how to evolve towards that vision.

Team DevOps versus organizational efficiency. The DevOps philosophy of “you build it, you run it” is very attractive to individual delivery teams, and it certainly makes sense for smaller organizations. But for organizations with dozens, hundreds, or even thousands of delivery teams working in parallel your costs and risks quickly skyrocket. These organizations quickly realize that having a flexible operations/infrastructure team to support the delivery teams to leverage common infrastructure and guidance will help to optimize the overall workflow across your DAE – Follow the Pragmatism principle.